The Baron and The Count

The Peninsula Paris is a paradox, being the newest of the Peninsula hotels (as of 2014) and the second oldest. As a Peninsula hotel, the property’s history has only just begun; as a building, Number 19 Avenue Kléber’s history stretches back to Napoléonic France and the Hausmannian renovation of the city.

These competing currents are reflected in the building’s new façade, where “… a beaux arts frontage has been tattooed with an aggressive glass porch that hangs from the façade like a gaudy necklace on ageing film star,” according to one critic.

The Peninsula Paris’s corner of L’Etoile witnessed the birth of Impressionism and includes an aristocratic lineage that embraces a Russian count and Spanish queen. Its interior has witnessed the full scale of human drama including death, torture, attempted assassinations, love, war, peace, acts of creativity and cruelty as well as desperate attempts to change the course of world history.

The Peninsula Paris’s pedigree is derived from it being the re-incarnation of a palatial property that originally opened as the Majestic Hotel in 1908. Three years previously The Peninsula New York was unveiled in Manhattan as the Gotham Hotel.

But the roots of The Peninsula Paris go much deeper, to the middle of the 19^th century. The original building on the Peninsula’s site was a romantic chateau built for a Russian billionaire. Following his departure it became a nest of intrigue and dangerous liaisons for a Spanish monarch. Once she had departed the Russian’s gorgeous petite-chatau it was razed to the ground, with some of its most beautiful fittings looted for use in the new Majestic Hotel.

The Peninsula hotels throughout Asia and the United States all have fascinating stories to tell and each one has been articulated through a unique approach to heritage and craftsmanship. It is fitting that The Peninsula’s first hotel in Europe should have the most layered story of all the company’s properties, and be so emphatically in need of The Peninsula’s unique attention to detail. The Peninsula’s task in Paris has been to take charge of a building that was ravaged by war, Nazis and government bureaucrats, so that it might return to and exceed its former grandeur.

Carving The Peninsula Paris from a century-old block of granite, glass and timber has been an exacting task, involving a small army of construction workers, architects, restoration experts and interior designers

When the building that stands at 19 Avenue Kléber was handed over to The Hong Kong and Shanghai Hotels, Limited in 2008, the interior had been scarred by 10 decades of mixed use that ranged from its original purpose as Leonard Tauber’s grandiose Hotel Majestic, though roles as a military field hospital during World War One, the headquarters of the German Staff Army during the Second World War, the venue for peace conferences that gave birth to the League of Nations in 1919 and ended the war in Vietnam in 1973, and as an international conference centre under the control of the French government’s Foreign Ministry.

Along the way Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, Irving Berlin and Dmitri Shostakovich had all been visitors, making Number 19 one of the most interesting buildings in Paris.

The first task facing those in charge of the renovation was to remove everything that was not an authentic part of the 1908 building and then to decide what remaining aspects of the original Hotel Majestic were worth preserving. As this demolition and preservation task proceeded, new construction began in the basement to set fresh, strong foundations to support The Peninsula Paris’ luxurious amenities, which have doubled the weight of the original building.

For some urban street corners the events, from 2008 to 2014 would have been enough excitement for a dozen lifetimes. For Number 19 Avenue Kléber, four years of renovation have been just another chapter in a story that began in 1852, when the plot the hotel occupies was a muddy field criss-crossed by hunting trails.

The Paris of the mid-nineteenth century was a very different place from the modern day City of Light. It was only one-fifth the size of 21^st century Paris and many of the city’s famous buildings had yet to be built. The Paris of 1852 was a place that was trying to catch its breath after 73 years of revolution. It had seen the birth and death of two revolutionary republics, the decapitation, restoration and final abolition of the Bourbon monarchy, the rise and fall of Napoléon Bonaparte’s empire and the creation of Louis Napoléon’s Second Empire. This followed his successful coup détat against the Second Republic, of which he had been President.

Over the course of seven decades, Paris had seen the executions of Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and Robespierre along with 1,116 other nobility and “enemies of the revolution” at the Place de la Révolution (now known as the Place de la Concorde) plus the events of 1832 that were captured in Victor Hugo’s epic novel Les Misérables.

The operatic events in Les Misérables owe much of their power to the geography of 19^th century Paris. The narrow streets and bewildering alleyways of the pre- Second Empire city were a perfect breeding ground for disease, poverty, prostitution, banditry and revolution.

By mid-century, as Paris took a break from blood-letting and coups, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, who by then had been crowned monarch and emperor of France, decided it was time to embark on a different kind of revolution, one driven by architecture, bricks and mortar. The Robespierre of the Emperor’s coup d’maison was “Baron” Georges-Eugène Haussmann, a lawyer from an Alsace merchant family who became one of the world’s most memorable urban planners, responsible both for the destruction of medieval Paris and the creation of the “new Paris” that today entrances visitors with its wide avenues and romantic courtyards.

Haussmann’s philosophy was simple – he and his employer the Emperor wanted a city in which “men and air” could circulate. And beneath this laudable motive was a desire to build a Paris in which barricades would be impossible to defend because the new, wide avenues would accommodate large numbers of cavalry ready to quickly dispense with any revolutionary resistance.

Haussmann’s plan included expansive gardens, uniform building heights and bold iconic features with which to anchor the city’s image as a place of high culture and French dignity, including the Opéra de Paris (designed by Charles Garnier and opened in 1875 after 14 years of construction) and the Arc de Triomphe.

The street where The Peninsula Paris now stands was never within the condensed and near-subterranean warren of streets that gave medieval Paris its peculiar charms. In 1836, the year the Arc de Triomphe was finished, the fields and hunting trails that connected the Bois de Boulogne to the Chaillot plain, leading to the village of Chaillot still occupied the land that now includes Avenue Kléber.

Haussmann would begin work on this part of new Paris in the mid-1860s, around the time Sir Ellis and Sir Elly Kadoorie, founders of The Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels, were born in Baghdad. Haussmann was lucky to find this portion of Paris still available. Had Napoléon Bonaparte been able to realise one of his more grandiose architectural dreams it’s doubtful that Avenue Kléber would exist.

In 1811 Napoléon Bonaparte decreed that an enormous area of the Chaillot plain should be used as the site of a palace to pay homage to his son, Napoléon François Charles Joseph Bonaparte. Napoléon’s offspring had been given the title Roi de Rome (King of Rome) at birth as a courtesy and Napoléon had designs to erect a Palais de Roi de Rome. This immensity was to spread from site of the Palais de Chaillot up to the Arc de Triomphe (swallowing the route the Avenue Kléber now takes) and was designed to pay tribute to young “Franz”, as he was known at court, as well as underlining Bonaparte’s dynastic claims on the French throne.

Napoléon said the Palais de Roi de Rome should be a “monument higher than all the palaces past and present”. Instead Napoléon’s empire collapsed, he was exiled to Elba and construction of the Palais was abandoned. Like many things in France, The Peninsula Paris is only where it is today because Napoléon’s ambitions so far exceeded his reach.

This left the Chaillot plain available for a key element of Haussmann’s plan, which was to redesign the area around the Arc de Triomphe, with and gracious avenues radiating from its heart.

This notion became L’Etoile and the street now known as Avenue Kléber was one of its most important components. However, in 1864, when the streets that make up L’Etoile’s circle of boulevards were prepared for widening, Avenue Kléber was originally called the Avenue du Roi de Rome, in honour of Napoléon III’s nephew.

The archives of ancient Paris record that an avenue named de Passy opened in the city on March 6^th 1858, that this thoroughfare became Avenue du Roi de Rome after 1864 and was situated in “proximité d’une portion de l’ancienne enceinte des Fermiers généraux”. In other words, where the Peninsula Paris stands today there were once potato fields and cattle grazing.

A photograph from 1865 shows a Paris that is unrecognisable today – or maybe a Paris that is recognisable only to the residents of small market towns in the Loire Valley, those used to living in the “proximity of farms.” In the image the buildings look medieval and more like the homes of agricultural merchants than the monumental blocks that would soon replace them.

The archive photograph also contains a fragment of another property on the plot that would become Number 19. It was soon to be occupied by the 19^th century’s equivalent of a Russian oligarch, albeit one with extremely cultured tastes, and it is at this moment that the true aristocratic heritage of The Peninsula Paris begins to take shape.

The Paris archives record that in February 1864 construction began on three lots comprised of 19 Rue du Roi de Rome and the western end of Avenue de Portugais. The lots belonged to one Comte de Basilewski, and the archives note that on February 18 “there was to begin construction of a hôtel paticulier with a design by Clement Parent.” The combined size of these lots was the length and depth of a city block. This fact that was to prove fateful in terms of the long-term survival of Basilewski’s hôtel.

Count Basilewski was among the richest men in Russia when he decided to build a petite chateau in Paris. The count’s father had amassed an enormous fortune through his influential role in the court of the Russian Tsar, where he had helped to collect taxes. Alexsandr took his inheritance from his father and invested it in Russian gold mines, more than trebling its size. When Count Basilewski died in 1878, he was able to leave Princess Souvoroff, his eldest daughter (he had no sons) a fortune that conveyed upon her an income of US$1,250,000 per year, making her the richest woman in the world.

Clement Parent was from a family of architects well known in aristocratic circles. His brother Henri, also an architect in 1860 narrowly missed the commission to design the Paris Opera building – he came second in the competition behind Charles Garnier.

Even with such a rarefied background, Parent must have been surprised by the exacting standards demanded by Count Basilewski, who had conceived of a Parisian residence that would be fit for a monarch and that “looked like a chateau from its façade, a palace in its interior and had all the conveniences that modernity can allow.” By modernity one images Basilewski meant proper plumbing; one of the Haussmannian innovations in the remodelling of Paris being a sewerage system that ran under the Avenue du Roi de Rome.

But hygiene was not the most important goal in Basilewski’s mind. He instructed Parent to create a palace that would be worthy of what the Russian aristocrat called “the capital of the world.” Included in the plans was a courtyard that could be accessed by six doors, with each door flanked by stone pillars upon which allegorical figures had been carved by Bloche to represent the “four quarters of the globe”.

Basilewski also specified that the building should be two stories high above a cavernous basement equipped with an enormous wine cellar. The building was composed of three pavilions which, according to a 19^th century newspaper report, had at their centre “a portico sustained by eight columns of composite order, these surmounted by the heraldic shield of Count Basilweski”.

Parent had cut his teeth doing chateau renovations for those remnants of the French aristocracy who survived the 1789 revolution, or for nouveau riche citizens who had profited from the Napoléonic era. The building Parent created had a romantic, bourgeois air. It possessed aristocratic and regal flourishes but mostly its voice was one of wealth and power. This was even more so in the building’s interior, the centrepiece of which was a vestibule built entirely of white marble from Carrera. It was a structure built to last and become a monument to its owners.

The new hotel quickly became the talk of Paris and for the first time the site of the future The Peninsula Paris was a glittering magnet for socialites. Parties were held there almost nightly when Basilewski was in town, largely at the urging of his three daughters, especially Princess Souvoroff, née Countess Koucheleff, who was one of late 19^th century Europe’s most famous social butterflies. She would hold court at Number 19 with her two sisters, the Countess de Galvo and Madame Dublet.

Despite the opulence surrounding the Count, all was not well at Number 19. Rumours had been circulating in Paris that Basilewski had been forced to leave Russia because his father had fallen out with the Tsar. There was also gossip about gambling, although there has never been any hard evidence that Basilewski had lost significant sums at the gaming tables. For whatever reason, the Basilewskis were resident at 19 Avenue Kléber for a remarkably short time. In 1868 the Count sold his expensive new home to Queen Isabella II of Spain, who had recently been driven from the throne.

When Count Basilewski left his hôtel particulier he was 82 years old and his age may have been one of the reasons for his sudden departure. Within a few months he had relocated to St Petersburg, where he died in 1878, at the age of 92. Although he had been away from Number 19 for a decade, the fame of the Hotel Basilewski remained part of his legacy.

On May 22^nd 1878 The New York Times published a story marking the Count’s death, spelling his name with a “v”, in the Russian fashion. It reported that “Count Basilevski, regarded as the richest man in Russia, who had for many years past enjoyed an income of 5,000,000 of roubles, or about US$4,000,000 a year, died at St Petersburg on the 4^th instant at the age of 92. He had passed much of his life in Paris, where he built the beautiful Hotel Basilevski.”

The New York Times had good reason to focus on Number 19 Avenue Kléber. Since it became the home of Queen Isabella II, the former Basilewski residence had been transformed from an architectural curiosity into one of the most captivating and talked-about buildings in Paris, where plots and scandals were commonplace. And in each one Queen Isabella herself usually played a leading role.

For the next 36 years the corner that is now home to The Peninsula Paris was one of the most watched spots in Europe, and all because of the Queen’s astonishing charisma and weakness for men many years her junior.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

More Images of Making The Paris Peninsula